Sustainability Technology & The Evolution of Smart Cities

Tag: water pollution

Water contamination is a great issue in many industrialized cities. This is especially clear in many Asian countries where the rivers are polluted from their numerous electronic recycling factories.

Technology:

Perry Alagappan from Texas has designed a filter that will be able to filter 99% of heavy metals from water using graphene nanotubes. After use, the filter can be rinsed with a vinegar mix and the residue will be pure metal that can be used to produce products like cell phones etc.

Utilizing this technology in contaminated rivers and lakes in less developed countries could be very beneficial. It would help make the water cleaner, improving the overall health of the population.

Furthermore, this will provide a more sustainable way to produce new metal products. This could in turn make products like cell phones more affordable for the population.

Stakeholders:

Government

Manufacturing companies

Chemical engineers

Cell phone manufacturers

Wastewater workers

Maintenance workers

Implementation

Provide proper education and detailed information about the product

Convince the government to invest in the product

Create efficient residue subtracting procedures

Main article: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/aug/27/texas-teenager-water-purifier-toxic-e-waste-pollution

“This is an interesting idea in theory. It does raise a couple of questions about the implementation and practicalities, though. How will it harvest and store the energy, and how long will the charge last? Will they be able to make the paint 100% explosion safe? Because whenever hydrogen and oxygen directly interact there will be an explosion unless proper precautions are taken. I could not see anything about these issues in the article.
However, if these things are sorted and made fool-proof, this could be an amazing opportunity for houses to start creating their own fuel source. In turn, this paint could even be used on ships sailing long distances to make the journey more energy efficient, as ships are known to be a massively polluting.”

Floating villages, mostly in South East Asia, generally flush their waste directly into the water beneath them. As these residents depend entirely on the water they live on (e.g. fishing, bathing etc.), this discharge has grave effects on health due to bacterial diseases.

Technology/Article:

Handy Pods, developed by Wetlands Work, use local plants to filter sewage waste prior to releasing it back into the water. The waste is first filtered through local plants that soak up waste toxins, like E.coli, up to 99.999% without chemicals or power. The remaining cleaned water is then free to be released back into the lake.

An additional benefit is that this technology can be at low cost and using local materials.

This project has already been deployed in Prek Toal, a floating village on a lake in Cambodia, that is home to roughly 100,000 people.

Although cheap, Wetlands Work will need investors to raise capital to have this technology deployed in various other floating village communities

NGOs will need to implement this technology on the ground (teach communities how to build it, how to maintain it, the health and environmental benefits etc.)

Ideally, implementation would target lakes/areas where this technology has already been partially implemented because even if some villages on a given lake have the technology, but others don’t, then they will not get the full health and environmental benefits that come with such filtration.

Animal husbandry is responsible for more than 14% of greenhouse gas emissions; 65% of those emissions come from raising cattle for beef and dairy.

Producing one kilogram of beef uses 15,000 liters of water and adds 300 kilograms of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Livestock and livestock feed occupies up to 30% of the earth’s ice-free land; 1-2 acres of rainforest are clear-cut every second to raise animals; the majority of crops raised are used to feed livestock, not people.

335 million tons of animal waste is generated annually in the US alone. Animal waste is one of the main contributors to water pollution and of dead-zones in rivers and oceans.

The world’s population is projected to grow to 9.5 billion by 2060; the global diet has shifted to include more animal protein.

Description of Synthetic or Cultured Meat

Although fake meat has been around for decades, it has never successfully entered the market because many products are unpalatable and expensive. The complexity of meat, including the flavor and texture, is difficult to replicate.

An emerging method is to grow “animal free” meat. The process begins with the slaughter of an adult cow to extract stem cells, which is use to culture the muscle tissue, and a cow fetus to obtain a serum used to grow the tissue. The DNA from these two animals will be used to grow enough synthetic meat to replace herds of slaughtered cows.

Stem cells are fed into a broth consisting of around 100 synthetic nutrients combined with a serum extracted from the cow fetus. As the cells split over the course of a week they form sheets a few millimeters thick. The end result is mixed with other organic compounds, including beet juice, to simulate the texture of beef.

Science has not been able to recreate anything resembling steak or chicken, however a beef broth has been produced; it could help feed the world’s growing appetite for animal protein.

Stakeholders

Animal farmers

Slaughterhouses

Meat replicators

Meat eaters

The environment

Deployment

Following additional investments into R&D, “animal free” meat can be produced anywhere using significantly less resources that traditional animal husbandry.

The emerging industry’s goal is to create a 25,000 liter bioreactor, large enough to provide meat for up to 10,000 people per year.

There are two significant obstacles: the current process is prohibitively expensive and large-scale adoption of replicated meat will take a shift in culture/tastes.

Storm water is one of the main causes of pollution in cities. All the water runoff that is produced accumulates waste and pollutants throughout the city and is finally poured into rivers and water bodies, affecting environments and natural resources that people depend on.

The technology

The BaySeparator is a water treatment system that treats runoff throughout entire storms, no matter their intensity and duration.

In the following link it is explained how it works with different storm intensities:

BaySaver Techonogies Inc. is a company that designs and manufactures stormwater treatment products. They created the BaySeparator in order to improve older systems that treated only the first flush of runoff. The idea was to create a new technology able to treat the stormwater throughout the entire storm.